scattering limbs until I cannot
tell where my frame ends and yours begins.

Neither are we paintings waiting
to be finished by the next artist that passes.

And while I may be like a fruit
spoiled by sun on a windowsill,

I hear my own cry beginning to
rise from rubble,

baby girl, no one can ever steal
your shine.

I still look upward as if the
sky could exonerate me.

***

Imagine this: every time you come across something in
life that you want to remember, you pull out a post-it note and scribble down
details about it. You might scribble down a nice thing that someone said about
you. Maybe you record a sentence or two about that one moment, when the sun
shined on water so perfectly, you couldn’t help but think of the most recent
conversation with your schizophrenic mother—when she didn’t sound crazy. Maybe
you scribble about the first time you realized your best friend was no longer
your friend, but you don’t write on the post-it that your friend isn’t your
friend anymore because you haven’t learned that yet.

Instead, you describe the quick flicker in her eyes
that you might have missed but didn’t. You don’t write anything more about the
flicker either, you just write that it was there, and what it looked like, but
not what it meant. You’re not ready to discuss such things yet.

Eventually
you start to color code your post-it notes. You scribble down the things that
you remember fondly on the pink post-it notes. On the blue ones, anything that
feels like tears, or anger, or all the times that a white person responded to
the rolled r in your last name with: I have a good friend that’s Mexican. On
the yellow ones, you write the things you haven’t quite decided how to feel
about, like prep school, which ultimately equipped you with more words and more
ways to use them to depict all of these moments, but also inspired more than a
few of the blue post-it notes.

Imagine
now that your room is overflowing with post-it notes. They are on the walls and
the bed post. They are on your desk and computer, and covering the whole window
so that you can’t see sun, or rain, or people walking by. There are so many
post-it notes that you’ve even filled your underwear drawer, so you resolve
that you have to do something with them. You have to be able to open the window
without fearing that some of your post-it notes will fly away before you can
make them something beautiful. So you sit Indian-legged in the center of your
room and start peeling away at the post-it notes that you can reach first. They
aren’t necessarily the most compelling post-it notes, but they are the ones
that you can grab without rising. You don’t know exactly what to do with these
post-it notes, but you know you’re not ready to rise again and you don’t.

Now
that you’ve started to read the post-it notes, you begin to cry over them,
making ink trails between them. Suddenly it hits you: you’re not crying over
any single post-it note but at the joy of having them…to remember. The thing
is, as you remember, you don’t look at the post-it notes the same way. You
decide that they don’t do enough for the memories, and you need to record them
in a way that surpasses scribbled, abrupt words. So you begin to string post-it
notes together on a page. The page is longer and wider, so you weigh it down
with words too heavy for post-it notes. You use words in a way that makes you
ache so thoroughly that it doesn’t feel like pain; it feels like metaphors
spilling from rooftops because the clouds got too heavy to hold them (that’s
the best way you can describe it anyway). This is the joy of writing:
deliberately placing post-it note memories onto a page so that those words don’t
just sit where you stuck them. They fly now from mind, to mouth, to ear, to
soul, and back again, and the movement is so great, so unsettling, and
grounding, that you stay right there, on the middle of your floor,
Indian-legged, and you breathe the breath of someone just trying to take it all
in.

I am writing a book on Fluxus. Fluxus was (and
still is) a loose group of artists (Yoko Ono is perhaps the most famous) from
around the globe (most from the US, Germany, France, and Japan) who sought to
blur the boundary between art and life. Much of what they did was simple and
silly, and I’m especially interested in exploring the complex and serious ideas
that were hidden underneath. The book will focus on the American artists in
the group and will examine the connections between their work and the ideas
that drove the various social and cultural upheavals of the sixties. My
argument is that the political dimension of Fluxus is far more significant than
people have thought. At this point, I am still early in the writing process. I
have been on sabbatical this year and have been collecting information on different
artists as well as historical accounts of the sixties. I’ve also taken a few
trips into New York to look through the archives at MOMA and meet with
individuals who were (and still are) involved in Fluxus.

What do you love about it?

My favorite part of the writing process is
the beginning, when new ideas hit me and the shape of things changes suddenly. As
I take notes and concoct arguments and theories, the writing I do causes the various
artists, artworks, and movements to rearrange themselves in my mind. Obscure events
and concepts move into focus while other things and ideas that I had taken as
central move to the periphery. It’s a period of creativity in which it feels
like I am both the one who is moving the different parts and, at the same time,
a passive witness to parts moving themselves. It’s very exciting and I think it’s
this that keeps me hooked to writing because I have to admit that almost all of
the rest of it is hard and painful and unpleasant.

What about it (if anything) is driving you nuts?

Indeed much of it drives me nuts. The first
frustration comes when my words hit the page; they almost always lack the
eloquence and clarity and conviction that they (seem to) have in my mind. As a
result, it takes a long time for me to turn the mess of the first draft into
something I can say I’m happy with. It’s also the case that my revision process
is far from linear. My second draft is never a simply refinement of the first.
It’s almost always a complete rewrite (and often that’s the case with the third
and fourth drafts). In light of the messiness and non-linearity of my process,
I’ve gradually come to recognize that I need to have huge chunks of
uninterrupted time to focus on writing
(anything less than three hours is too short): it takes me at least an
hour to clear my head and get to a place where the words will come out in
anything resembling a coherent fashion. I suppose it’s a consequence of my
monomaniacal personality. Doing more than one thing at a time is almost impossible.

How would you describe your writing process?

I begin by taking tons of notes—both data
that I’ve collected and ideas I’ve come up with. Over time, I watch as the
ideas shift and expand and contract and mutate. When I feel that the process
has slowed down to a point where things seem settled and my time yields
diminishing returns, I make a very simple outline. In fact, it’s really just a
list. Each idea that I think is needed gets a single line. I’ll then move the individual
idea-lines up or down the list so that they fall into an order that seems to
make sense. Sometimes I’ll make a powerpoint to arrange the works of art that I
plan to discuss so that I get a sense of how the text might flow. Then I start
turning these idea-lines into paragraphs. Sometimes a few idea-lines will be
clustered to make a single paragraph; sometimes a single one will grow into a
handful of paragraphs. This part can be fun because it often yields up some
interesting surprises. I’ll usually need to go back to do more research and
will find that some of the ideas I thought were central should really be pushed
to the background while others should be moved to the fore. As each idea-line
is replaced by full paragraphs the writing mutates bit by bit into full draft.
Then the rewriting begins. Things will be taken apart and new paragraphs added.
New research will be done to supplement an idea that hadn’t occurred to me
earlier. When it seems like everything that needs to be there has found its
proper place, I play around with the sentences and individual words. I try not
to over-polish, partly because I’ve seen how easily the shine of vibrant
sentence can be scrubbed out of existence, but also because I just get tired
and want to stop. The process ends when I can’t stand to look at it anymore.
Then I send it to friend and hope I get a positive response. If I don’t get a
positive response I usually cry a little, wait a little, and then start tearing
it apart yet again.

What kind of feedback on your writing do you find most
helpful?

The most helpful feedback I get on my writing
comes in the early stages: I like to hear how a reader responds to the main
argument and evidence. Often I learn that I’ve incorrectly predicted some key suppositions
that a reader brings to the text or the sorts of questions that the reader is
most interested in having me answer. Feedback at this point has a huge effect
on how the draft develops. Since the text is still in its infancy, hearing that
I should cut it up and move stuff around is not nearly as frustrating as it is
after I’ve worked to get it into what I think is its final shape.

What would you like students to know about you as a writer?

I am not a natural writer. When I was a kid
I was a poor and disengaged writer (and reader, too). It’s only after many
years that I have become comfortable with a keyboard beneath my fingers; so I
suppose I am a good example of how it’s possible to become an effective writer
through nothing more than persistence.

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Right
now, I'm writing an index as well as publicity materials for my upcoming book, Dramatic battles in eighteenth-century
France: philosophes, anti-philosophes and polemical theatre. I'm under
the gun--the book is set to be released this summer by Oxford University's
Voltaire Foundation! I'm also working on an outline for my next book, a
critical edition of France's first patriotic tragedy, Pierre De Belloy's Le Siège de Calais. Besides those two
big projects, I've got some conferences in Europe this fall (I'll be on leave
in Paris next academic year) that I am starting to brainstorm. I also have an
article on eighteenth-century prisons that is due in the early fall--it's in the
very early stages. Busy times, I guess!

What do you love
about it?

I love the fact that my first book project
is finally coming to an end. Dramatic
battles has been in the works for five years and it feels great to see
it come into fruition. I also love the brainstorming process for new projects.
I feel that all ideas are on the table and anything is better than nothing at
this point!

What about it (if
anything) is driving you nuts?

I'm
pretty sure that indexing is one of the most excruciating jobs in the world! A
big thanks to Sarah Schaefer ('14), my research assistant, who is helping me
tremendously with that! Another tough thing is the moment when loosely
organized ideas need to become concrete sentences and paragraphs. Funny how
this is always a time when it seems incredibly important to clean my desk or
check baseball scores online.

How would you
describe your writing process?

Before coming to Bucknell, I had the opportunity to work
with Simon Harrison (http://www.humtec.rwth-aachen.de/index.php?article_id=480&clang=1).
Simon was my housemate and co-worker at the Ecole normale supérieure in Lyon, France; he was also my
writing partner (highly recommended for anyone who needs to be held accountable
for his/her writing!). Back in 2007, Simon and I were both struggling with our
dissertations so we read a bunch of books about how to be more productive
writers. The suggestions for how to write more (or better) can be all over the
place but there is one piece of advice in most of the literature on writing:
you have to write often to achieve desired results. I think there are these
myths like "you should wait for inspiration" or "you need a huge
chunk of time to get anything done." This may be true for some people
(although I doubt it) but not for me; I try to carve out at least 30 minutes -
1 hour each day and write. It may sound bizarre but you'd be surprised what you
can get done in just 30 minutes. I guess it took me about a decade to learn
that you need to actually write to
achieve good writing results. Duh!

What kind of feedback
on your writing do you find most helpful?

I
think my favorite type of feedback is what I would call "optimistic
honesty." Optimistic because the reader knows that you can do better but
honest enough to really let you know if an idea (or paragraph, or sentence) is
solid. My dissertation director at LSU was, and remains, a fantastic model of
"optimistic honesty" (Kate Jensen: http://appl003.lsu.edu/artsci/frenchweb.nsf/$Content/Jensen?OpenDocument).

I write in English and in French and I really appreciate when my French readers
whip out the red pen and go to town on me. I have to say, they usually tack
more towards honesty than optimism.

What
would you like students to know about you as a writer?

I
think that my students appreciate how open I am about the writing process. I'm
always harping on them to "start early" but I share my own weaknesses
and fears about the whole process (and the fact that I need to set artificial
deadlines for myself because I don't just naturally start early!). I guess the
number one thing that I would like them to know is that I was a very
unsuccessful writer in college. I started projects too late, I didn't take the
time to read the directions, I didn't revise, and I certainly didn't proofread.
I struggled for years and I struggle now. But I want them to know that writing
makes you a better writer. It sounds very basic but it's true. Talent is great
but anyone can learn to write better
if they write more often.

About Me

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